Investigators' Blog
Rebecca Ford
On Friday 28th August, our new Associate Investigator Rebecca Ford took part in the International Sustainability Transitions Conference 2015 (IST15)
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Research session:
Cultures of transitions:
Using the EC framework to examine socio- technical transitions [143]
Talk: The rise of PV: opportunities and barriers for socio-technical transition.
Rebecca Ford, Janet Stephenson, Michelle Scott, John Williams, Ben Wooliscroft, David Rees, Geoff King.
The talk was about PV uptake in NZ: Privately owned micro-generation is challenging the normal operation of electricity systems. This paper uses the Energy Cultures framework to explore PV uptake as an interplay between existing technologies, policies, markets, practices, norms, and socio-cultural meanings. System dynamics modelling is used to probe interactions between multiple levels within this complex socio-technical transition. We explore feedback loops that may act as change levers, as well as the potential impacts on electricity markets and new models that may be required for future operation.
Jaffe on Marsden Fund
Back in May, after some criticism of the Marsden Fund processes made it into the media, I wrote about Te Pūnaha Matatini investigator Adam Jaffe’s study of the Marsden Fund. Adam presented his preliminary findings at our Launch workshop in February, and today they were released as a Motu working paper.
There is a short media release here, but the upshot is that it shows that receiving a Marsden grant leads to higher productivity and impact, at least in terms of papers published and the citations received. This won’t surprise many, but it is very exciting to see the benefits of Marsden funding quantified for the first time.
In fact I think this is a watershed study. It is the first rigorous evaluation of a New Zealand research funding process ever undertaken and it has thrown up some fascinating insights. It also demonstrates the benefits of the sustained collection and retention of science and innovation data, and the Marsden Fund should be commended for its commitment to doing so.
Unfortunately, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and its predecessors have done a poor job of curating their data since New Zealand moved to a contestable funding system in the early 90s, which means that much of our funding system remains opaque. I understand, however, that the Ministry is working on a plan to put in place systems and practices that will enable these sorts of evaluations to be made in coming decades.
What sort of data do you need? The difficulty in evaluating contestable research funding is that funding agencies go to great lengths to select the best projects and the best applicants. You can’t just compare the performance of those applicants who got funded to those who didn’t, because any difference in performance might just be a sign that your application process is doing its job in selecting performers from non-performers, rather than a signal from the funding.
One way to avoid this selection bias would be to allocate funding randomly, but few funding agencies are willing to do this. And even if we decided that a randomized control trial was a good idea, we’d still have to wait a decade or so to acquire data for the study.
Instead, Adam and his team have made use of the Marsden fund panel scores that are used to rank the projects of applicants in the second round of the Marsden fund. These panel scores can be used to estimate the selection bias in your performance data, enabling you to back out the effect of the funding itself. The Marsden fund has kept the panel scores for both the successful and unsuccessful projects for a number of years, and this has been matched with bibliometric data for applicants to measure subsequent performance.
The most interesting finding from this data is that the expert panels that evaluate Marsden Fund proposals do not seem to have a selection bias! You see a jump in performance for those applicants who were funded, but otherwise the subsequent performance of applicants seems to be independent of their ranking by the panel. Panels are not able to pick winners, but those that they do give the money to go on to win.
As a panelist myself, I seldom felt that we were making meaningful selections at the second round – almost all the proposals we looked at seemed eminently fundable. This inability to pick winners does not necessarily mean that the panels are redundant. I expect that there might still be benefits that accrue from encouraging researchers to plan and develop research plans that can stand up to scrutiny from these panels. It does suggest though that we should be cautious about using success in Marsden as a proxy for research quality, particularly when it comes to career advancement.
Perhaps the best news for researchers is that the study suggests that there would be no diminishing returns if we were to double or treble the size of the Marsden fund. If we could fund all second round applicants, we would be unlikely to see any decrease in the quantity and impact of the research carried out, just a step change in performance across the research sector.
There are some caveats to the study, so it is well worth reading in its entirety (here it is again). For instance, the lift in performance measured could be indirect. If winning a Marsden grant increases your chances of getting funding from other sources, then some of the boost in performance might come from other funding rather than Marsden. If we had good data from MBIE, we might be able to tell …
It is also worth noting that the Marsden Fund is there to do more than generate papers and citations. Ultimately we would like to be able to measure impacts in other ways. The sort of study that might come next would be to look at the subsequent careers of Marsden-funded PhD students. Does working at the cutting edge of science set you up for a successful career?
Declaration: I was a Principal Investigator on two Marsden-funded projects during the period that this study covers (in 2006 and 2008), and I was on the Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry Panel from 2010-2012.
Public Lecture – Professor Ingrid Daubechies
Public Lecture – Professor Alan Hastings
Te Pūnaha Matatini presents
Distinguished Professor Alan Hastings University of California, Davis. Professor Alan is visiting New Zealand and will be giving public lectures around the country.
Driven by human forces, there are great challenges to maintain environmental systems and environmental services. Environmental management depends on predictions of the results of management actions which must also be made in the context of limited resources and in the face of conflicting desires of participants. Beginning with an overview of several challenging issues in environmental management including invasive species, fisheries management, and the provision of other ecosystem services, this public talk will focus on how prediction and management on appropriate time scales depends on relatively simple mathematical descriptions, incorporating relevant ecological and economic details, looking at several particular challenging systems that illustrate the general principles: algal-coral-grazer systems and the maintenance of healthy reefs and control of invasive species.
For more on Professor Alan Hastings, see http://two.ucdavis.edu/~me/
We are very pleased to announce the following public lectures
Christchurch Wednesday 2nd September
Where: Room 031, Level 0, Erskine building, University of Canterbury
When: 6pm
Hosted by the University of Canterbury in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Alex James | Alex.James@canterbury.ac.nz
Dunedin Friday 4th September
Where: Archway 4 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago,
When: 5:30pm
Hosted by the University of Otago in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Sarah Hikuroa | s.hikuroa@auckland.ac.nz
Auckland Tuesday 8th September
Where: University of Auckland, City campus 303-G23
When: 6pm
Hosted by the Department of Physics, The University of Auckland, in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Sarah Hikuroa | s.hikuroa@auckland.ac.nz
Shaun on New Zealand’s Economy in Innovation
Here’s Shaun talking with Mark Sainsbury, on RadioLive about innovation and New Zealand’s economic future. Listen here
Les on the history of economics in New Zealand
Here’s Les talking with Mark Sainsbury, on RadioLive about the history of economics in New Zealand. Listen here
A prize of one’s own
by Kate Hannah
In 1947 Elizabeth Joan Batham made New Zealand science history when she became the first woman to win a Royal Society of New Zealand prize, medal, or award.[i] When she was named the 1947 recipient of the Hamilton Memorial Prize “for the encouragement of an early career researcher currently based in New Zealand for scientific or technological research in New Zealand”, that prize, named after Augustus Hamilton, the 1909-1910 President of the Society, had been running for 24 years.
The first award established by the Society, in 1911, the Hutton Medal for earth, plant, and animal sciences (named for Captain FW Hutton FRS, 1836-1905, who was the first President, 1904-05) is now awarded annually, rotating through the disciplines, but between 1911- 1995 was awarded every three years. More medals and awards were established over the next 104 years, so that in 2015 we now have 12 annual awards and another 9 awards biennially, triennially, or irregularly.
Back to Betty Batham. She was responsible for the redevelopment of what is now the Portobello Marine Biological Station, University of Otago, which during her tenure (1950-1974) gained “an international reputation, although for many years it was little involved in routine teaching and research activities of the university,”[ii] which seems to be her successor, John Jillet’s careful way of summarising the sexism Batham faced.[iii]
For her efforts, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1962, and the Department of Marine Science at the University of Otago set up a prize in her name in 2004. The deep-sea vessel at Portobello that provides visitors with a virtual benthic (sea-floor) experience is called the DSV Batham.[iv]
Betty Batham in the laboratory, 1962
The next woman to win a Royal Society of New Zealand prize was Lucy Cranwell Smith, awarded the Hector Medal in 1954:
Lucy Cranwell Smith, citation for Hector Medal
The Hector Medal’s citation is currently “for outstanding work in chemical, physical, or mathematical and information sciences … awarded annually in rotation among the disciplines.”[vi] It was previously broader: “for plant sciences, chemical sciences, human sciences, solid earth sciences, mathematical physical and engineering sciences, and animal sciences”.[vii]
Lucy Cranwell Smith, who went on to have a highly successful career in palynology at the University of Arizona, was the first woman to win the Hector Medal. It has been won by 2 other women in the subsequent half century. Dame Patricia Bergquist, the eminent zoologist and anatomist, was awarded the Hector Medal in 1989 for her work on invertebrate anatomy, and was made a Dame in 1994 for her contribution to science. In 2012, Margaret Brimble was the Hector Medal recipient, for “excellence in chemical sciences.”[viii]
The Hector Medal, named for Sir James Hector, is the second oldest of the Royal Society of New Zealand’s medals – it was first awarded in 1912, and since then, has been awarded to 99 men, and 3 women. The oldest award – the Hutton Medal established in 1911 – has been awarded to 41 men and 2 women in its over 100-year history. The Humanities Aronui Medal (2011), Mason Durie Medal (2012), Pickering Medal (2004), Thomson Medal (1985), Cooper Medal (1958), R.J. Scott Medal (1997), Hercus Medal (1997), and the T.K.Sidey Medal (1933) have all never been awarded to a woman.
Dion O’Neale, July 2015
Six of the male Hector Medal winners now have other Royal Society awards or prizes named after them: Leonard Cockayne, the 1912 winner, and Lucy Cranwell Smith’s mentor, for whom the Leonard Cockayne Memorial Lecture Series Award was named; Ernest Rutherford, 1916 winner, the Rutherford Medal. Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) was awarded the Hector Medal in 1932, and since 1997 the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal has been presented for outstanding work in the social sciences; Charles Fleming received the Hector Medal in 1963 – and the Royal Society’s Fleming Award was inaugurated in 1989; Trevor Hatherton, for whom the Hatherton Award is named, won the Hector Medal in 1981; in 1998, Paul Callaghan, in whose name the Callaghan Medal for Science Communication was commissioned, was awarded the Hector Medal.
Women do have a prize of their own, of a sort – or at least one of the 21 prizes and awards is named after a woman. The Dame Joan Metge Medal, commissioned in 2008, celebrates outstanding contributions in the social sciences, and has been won by women 3 out of the 4 times it has been awarded. However, this success rate for women does not reflect the prizes and awards presented by New Zealand’s preeminent science and research organisation accurately. Over the last 104 years, only 10% of all prizes have been awarded to women; with most success coming in the early career award – the Hamilton Memorial Medal, which women have won 11 times since 1923. Of the 19 prizes that are named after a person, just one of them is named after a woman, and 8 of the 21 available prizes and awards have NEVER been awarded to a woman.
Higher percentages of women have won the Dame Joan Metge Medal (75%) and the Pou Aronui Award (28%), and the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal (75%), but these prizes are in the humanities and social sciences, discipline areas generally perceived to have better representation of women – but as the May 2015 update to the Athena SWAN Charter notes:
We commit to addressing unequal gender representation across academic disciplines and professional and support functions. In this we recognise disciplinary differences including:
- the relative underrepresentation of women in senior roles in arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law (AHSSBL)[x]
Placed in the context of the relative underrepresentation of women in senior academic roles in humanities and social sciences, that no woman has ever won the Humanities Aronui Medal – for work of outstanding merit in the humanities, or the Mason Durie Medal– “awarded annually to the nation’s preemminent social scientist”[xi] is contextualised within a gap between the perceived relative equity in the humanities and social sciences, and the actual numbers of women in senior roles across those discipline areas.
It’s not hard to see that we have a problem. 8% women prizewinners doesn’t reflect the gender breakdown in society as a whole, but neither does it reflect the breakdown in science. Looking at a couple of individual prizes helps highlight that. Many would not be surprised that the Pickering Medal, technology medal for excellence, has never been awarded to a woman. But neither has the Sir Charles Hercus Medal, for excellence in molecular and cellular sciences, biomedical science or clinical science and public health– fields that many women have made an enormous contribution to.
Things have been getting better – more women are winning more prizes now than ever before. Since 1999 there has been at least 1 female prizewinner per year, a total of 25 prizes to 23 women in 15 years.[xii] Of those, however, 9 have been the Hamilton Memorial Prize (early career) or the Hatherton Award (best paper by a PhD student). That’s still only 16 senior prizes going to 14 women. One swallow does not make a summer, and all that. There’s still those 8 prizes that have never been awarded to a woman, and the T.K Sidey Medal’s been going since 1933. Many outstanding women – some of whom I have named here – have won a singular prize, and then gone on to great careers but, unlike their male counterparts, there’s no prize named for them.
In the UK, WISE – a campaign to promote women in science, technology, and engineering released a summary report in November 2014, “Not for people like me?” under-represented groups in science, technology, and engineering; this coincided with the Nielsen Report on Public Attitudes Towards Science and Technology, commissioned by New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment as part of The Nation of Curious Minds/Science and Society Project.
The WISE report states:
Girls … need to resolve the conflict between self-identity and STEM identity in order to see STEM as offering careers ‘for people like me’[xiii]
The Nielsen Report summarises public attitudes towards science and technology with the creation of 5 personas[xiv], representations of different segments of society:
Nielsen Report On Public Attitudes Towards Science and Technology, October 2014
You’ll note that while 3 of these personas are female, both segments of society with the most negative attitude towards science and technology are classified as female; in fact Nielsen go on to say:
In order to lift public engagement with science and technology we suggest that MBIE target the Optimistic Oliver and Penelope Public segments…we believe the Anxious Annie and especially the Negative Nellie group will be more difficult targets to convince[xv]
From those people we, as a scientific community, choose to honour and recognise with medals and awards, through the names given to those prizes, to the names selected to categorise segments of society when discussing public engagement with science, we seem to be saying to young women and girls “not for people like you.”
[i] What is now called the Royal Society of New Zealand was established as the New Zealand Institute in 1867, and renamed the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1933. For the purposes of clarity, this paper will refer to the Royal Society of New Zealand for both.
[ii] Jillet, John. ‘Batham, Elizabeth Joan,’ from The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 4 June 2013
http://www.teara.govt.nz/mi/biographies/5b13/batham-elizabeth-joan
[iii]http://www.nzmaritimeindex.org.nz//izperson.php?personid=999992497&SourceID=&person=E.B.J.&rid=0&refid=&hit=6
[iv] Betty Batham, in the laboratory, 1962 http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/36056/in-the-laboratory-1962
[v] Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1868-1961, vo. 82, 1954-1955, National Library of New Zealand. http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_82/rsnz_82_03_005740.html
[vi]Hector Medal citation, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/
[vii] Background to the Hector Medal, Royal Society of New Zealand, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/background/
[viii] Margaret Brimble, Hector Medal citation, 2012, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/recipients/
[ix] O’Neale, Dion. RSNZ Awards Visualisation http://bl.ocks.org/droneale/c3c4ea9f48b67722833d
[x] The Athena SWAN Charter, http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan/about-athena-swan/
[xi] Mason Durie Medal citation, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/mason-durie-medal/
[xii] In 2012, Professor Margaret Brimble won three prizes – the Hector, MacDiarmid, and Rutherford Medals.
[xiii] MacDonald, Averil. “Not for people like me?” Under-represented groups in science, technology and engineering, WISE, November 2014, p. 6 https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/not_for_people_like_me.pdf
[xiv] Report on Public Attitudes towards Science and Technology, Nielsen, MBIE, November 2014, p. 11 http://www.msi.govt.nz/assets/MSI/Update-me/Science-in-society-project/report-on-public-attitudes-towards-science-and-technology.pdf
[xv] ibid, p. 13
Some thoughts on Going Public
An abridged version of this blog post appeared in the University of Auckland’s Uninews on June 4th 2015.
Two years ago, towards the end of my term as President of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, a journalist asked me an astonishing question. News of the possible detection of harmful bacteria in a batch of Fonterra’s milk powder had just broken, yet the media was struggling to find any experts who would speak about the tests. The journalist who called me wanted to know whether scientists had gone quiet because the government was muzzling them.
I was surprised. The government has no ability to silence the science community. Although the government owns the Crown Research Institutes, they are not subject to the restrictions that the public service face on communicating with the media. And the responsibility of academic scientists to speak out is spelled out in the Section 162 of the Education Act, where it is made clear that we have a role as the “critic and conscience of society”. For the most part, scientists are free to speak out as they choose.
In practice, things are not so simple. In the case of the milk powder scare, many scientists who did have the expertise felt conflicted through their relationships with Fonterra, the Ministry of Primary Industries, or AgResearch. The silence that resulted meant that uninformed, fringe voices began to get airtime.
One of the few experts who did speak out was University of Auckland microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles. Writing on her well-known blog, Infectious Thoughts, she provided one of the very few scientific perspectives on the story and debunked some of the wilder theories being aired in the media. With this, Dr Wiles quickly became the go to person for the media, and finally, some sound science started appearing in news reports.
Like many researchers who have stepped up in a crisis, Dr Wiles asked herself that if she didn’t do it, who would? Yet, as she noted in her address to the New Zealand Association of Scientists Conference, Going Public, in April, the reaction from many of her colleagues was far from positive. To some, it seemed that she had spoken out of turn. And sadly, as we learned from other delegates at the conference in April, her experiences are far from unique. It seems that the scientific community can be its own worst enemy.
Communicating with the public, whether through the media or otherwise, is often seen as a less than serious pursuit for scientists – something best left for the twilight of one’s career, or to be attempted in the lead up to that crucial funding round. Time on twitter is time away from the lab, a trade-off that no true scientist – god forbid, one early in their career – should be prepared to make. And when an articulate young scientist upstages us in the media, it can ruffle our greying feathers.
Yet communication is a skill, and working with the media requires a great deal of commitment. The scientists who we hear from in public are those that have chosen to work hard at these skills and those who have put the sustained effort needed to build relationships with journalists. It is difficult work, made more difficult at times by the lack of recognition by colleagues or institutions.
It is also important to understand that the media has changed. The business model that supported public interest journalism for centuries is on the brink of collapse. Only Radio New Zealand can support specialist science reporters these days. If you are not pro-active in working with the media, they will often not have the time or resources to come knocking. As Fiona Fox, head of the UK Science Media Centre, puts it “the media will do science better when scientists learn to do the media better.”
If we want a better informed public in New Zealand – and dare I say it, a public prepared to put more tax dollars into university research – then the least we can do is support our colleagues who are working hard to bring this about.
Should the Marsden Fund be restructured?
By Shaun Hendy
The MacDiarmid Institute’s Kate McGrath created a bit of a stir on Friday with a blog post that took a critical look at the Marsden Fund’s decision to invite 15% fewer proposals into the second round of its funding process than it did last year. The Marsden Fund runs a two-round process: applicants submit a one-page expression of interest in February, with about a fifth of these then invited by expert panels to submit a more comprehensive proposal in May.
In 2014 20% of first round applicants were invited to submit a second-round proposal. This year this figure fell to just 17%. Below, I’ve plotted the fraction selected to submit second round proposals since 1998. After a spike in 2003, the fraction selected at the second round has returned to the levels seen in fifteen years ago. So, while not unprecedented, a 17% throughput at the first round is something not seen for a while.
The advantage of running a two-round system is that it can reduce the burden placed on the sector in the writing of comprehensive proposals. If we had a one-round system, everyone who wanted to apply would have to write a comprehensive proposal that was detailed enough for peer review. The more proposals that get through to the second round, the more work there is for the researchers that write them and the selection panels that evaluate them. The Marsden Fund Council chose to reduce the number of proposals selected for the second round this year because they wanted to reduce the workload for the sector.
McGrath is conscious of this issue, having blogged about compliance costs in late 2013: “The compliance costs of everyone applying for everything is costing our country real money that could be used producing real outcomes from the scientists utilising their time to ply their trade; scientific research rather than applying for funding that invariably they will never get.” In other words, the amount of effort we spend writing proposals should not be allowed overwhelm the effort we put in to our research.
Expectations
A slightly different way to look at this is to compute the expected value of writing a second-round proposal i.e. what is the expected pay-off in funding from submitting a second-round proposal? You can compute this by multiplying the likelihood that a second-round proposal will be funded by the average amount awarded. I’ve plotted this quantity below from 2001 to 2014, with a fantasy figure for 2015 based on the Marsden Fund’s indication that this year they will fund 90-95 proposals.
By reducing the number of proposals at the second round, the Marsden Fund Council can increase the expected value of second-round proposals to the applicants. A standard second-round proposal (as opposed to a fast-start) this year is expected to return $315,000-$319,000 compared to $287,000 in 2014. As there is less money available overall this year, if the Marsden Council had okayed a similar proportion of second-round proposals to what it did in 2014, then expected value of a second-round proposal would have fallen to around $250,000. This would have been well below the long-run average of $290,000 for the expected value of a second-round proposal.
However, in her recent post, McGrath says that is now “more difficult to get your foot in the door of arguably the most prestigious grants in the country”. Her concern is that panels might not be expert enough to make good decisions at the first cut, so that the country might be missing out on funding the best science. The assumption that McGrath makes is that decisions made at the second round, when panels have access to expert peer review, will be of significantly higher quality than those at the first round.
Picking winners
Yet recent work by Te Pūnaha Matatini investigator Adam Jaffe suggests that Marsden panels are not very effective at predicting the eventual success of the second round proposals they view. Jaffe’s findings (not yet published, but which were commissioned by the Marsden Fund Council) are broadly consistent with the findings of many similar studies in other countries: panels and peer reviewers are not very good at picking winners (although see this recent article).
These findings do not to say that panels aren’t doing their best. Rather, the evidence suggests it is simply an almost impossible challenge to predict the outcomes of cutting-edge scientific research. It is also far from clear that letting more proposals through to the second round would improve matters. In my opinion, when we know that panels have such a difficult job to do, it is better to acknowledge their limited effectiveness and to reduce the burden on the system accordingly rather than to double down as McGrath suggests.
One-round system?
One of the key disadvantages of a two-round process is that, all things being equal, it will have a much lower success rate than a one-round process. More people will be prepared to chance their arm in round one if they only need to complete a short application. Filling out a single-round application for an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, for instance, is considerably more onerous than the preparation of even a second-round Marsden proposal. The Australians are rewarded for the extra work involved with a success rate of 18%.
Despite this, I still prefer our system. If the ability of expert panels to predict funding success is poor, then better to have a system that minimises transaction costs. And as I noted in a blog post in March, I think we also need to acknowledge the increased research intensity in universities that has driven the oversubscription of the Marsden Fund.
I think the Marsden Fund Council is well aware of the trade-offs described above and has chosen a sensible course. In fact the Council should be commended for commissioning work to investigate the effectiveness of its decision-making process. The real fix for the system – increasing the Marsden Fund to match the increased level of research activity in our universities – is not within the Council’s control.
Ways to Change the World – Thoughts on a Panel at the Auckland Writers’ Festival
by Kate Hannah
Change, always present, is now, more than ever, the dominating feature of life on earth. This is how Phil Ball, the eminent science writer and former editor of Nature, described the world when asked by panel chair Jesse Mulligan what we’re doing right. “It’s more complex, more interconnected, more co-dependent than we’d ever imagined.” This increase in complexity – what Ball calls the shift from “the century of the molecule to the century of the system”- has resulted in a critical challenge to the tools and structures designed to deal with reductionism – the century of the molecule.
Ball had been asked to start with what we’re doing right; he responded with a reference to the last section of The Bone Clocks, by fellow Auckland Writers’ Festival attendee, David Mitchell, which describes an anthropogenic apocalyptic future, in which climate change has wrought severe environmental, social, and economic impacts. A future in which the very nature of the human condition, human society has been irrevocably changed. “I know that’s not what we’re doing right, but it’s an example of how science and technology both solves and creates problems.”
Fellow panellist, the surgeon and science writer Atul Gawande, expanded on this idea of increased complexity, describing how Gorovitz and MacIntyre had summarised human fallibility in 1975 as being caused by either ignorance (“the limitations of the present state of natural science”) or ineptitude (“from the wilfulness of negligence of the natural scientist.”) Gawande sees the state of the world now as related to ineptitude – a systemic failure to apply knowledge correctly, creating a what he describes as “complexities of inequity” in which things like life expectancy, infant mortality, female education levels, vary greatly between countries and within socio-economic and/or ethnic groups within countries.
Chinese journalist in exile, Xinran, whose radio interviews and books focusing on women in rural China provide a window into the complexities of inequity Gawande describes echoes the rate of change as a key contributing factor to the status quo. China, which has travelled from pre-industrial to post- industrial in three generations, calls into question the very notion of human happiness or wellbeing as the overarching goal of human society. Xinran’s China is a country in which there is a 200-year gap between the industrialised cities and the rural countryside, one in which the pinnacle of human happiness for a woman is to bear a son. There’s a cold draft that fills the ASB Theatre when Xinran talks about the 30 million missing Chinese daughters, a gap made since the introduction of the one child policy.
For Xinran, discourse moves between what is real and what is imagined – she evokes the I Ching as a text that described, well before we had scientific language to reveal it, the intersection of place and time, the code (DNA) embedded within everything. This notion of describing the human condition in multiple languages lies at the heart of ways to change the world. Charlotte Grimshaw, the novelist and short story writer, notes that both Ball and Gawande, as science writers, use examples from literature in their science writing. Gawande’s most recent book, Being Mortal, refers extensively to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which explores what it means to live, and thus die, without meaningful, human connection. Similarly, Ball refers to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen in his exploration of the uncertainty principle, and his discussion of the choices made by scientists during the Nazi era. For this panel, Snow’s two cultures are not riven apart, but connected by a shared language of image and metaphor that deepens human understanding.
I like to think that we at Te Pūnaha Matatini speak this language too; we’re aware of the impact of both ignorance and ineptitude, consistently trying to tell good, true stories about our increasingly interconnected and data-rich world. In this interplay between our existing human tools and structures, designed to deal with the twentieth century –there’s a sense that we’ve missed something in trying to reduce matter to its constituent parts – and the world we live in, in which the sum total of human knowledge concerns just 4 % of the universe – wherein we need to develop tools to understand self-organising phenomena that form complex patterns and hierarchies – is the founding motivation bringing this team of people together.
Given that what emerged from last Sunday’s panel discussion was a shared sense that the thing we are doing right is talking about the problems we face, the decisions we have to make, the increased need for human connection, Te Pūnaha Matatini’s central metaphor – ‘the meeting place for many faces’ – becomes more critical. It’s both an actual place in which many faces (peoples, disciplines, ideas) meet, and an image of how we imagine the best kind of human thinking and human interaction occurs, face to face, kanohi ki te kanohi. Charlotte Grimshaw said that what she and her fellow panellists, fellow writers’ festival participants and attendees were endeavouring to do was to “illuminate the problems that beset humanity;” more prosaically, we’ve said that at Te Pūnaha Matatini we’re trying to transform complex data about New Zealand into knowledge, tools, and insight to help make better decisions.
Better decisions? When asked for next steps, Ball responded: “Actually, we know what we need to change the world: we need more equality, more justice, more compassion, more tolerance, more love.” Pressed for a scientific answer – as the scientist on the panel – Ball responded with a list of value-filled abstract nouns. Gawande’s words take this notion of value further – describing happiness or wellbeing as emerging from a sense of purpose and connection. “We’ve lost the moral language that would allow us to ask the right questions.” As writers, as wisdom-seekers, as humans, the panel – a journalist, an author, a scientist, and a surgeon – agreed: the way to change the world is to adopt a stance based within family, human connection, relationship. From that place to stand, we then must engage compassion and curiosity – Gawande called these “the virtues or characters we need to bring to see the world.” Listening to those words, I instantly bought to mind our Te Pūnaha Matatini whakataukī: E tipu, e rea, mō ngā rā ō tāu ao. Grow up and thrive for the days destined you. Like Xinran, Grimshaw, Ball, Gawande, we’re approaching the questions at hand from a place of connection, compassion, and curiosity.